Groupon ignores 17 years of open source history, tries to trademark Gnome

Groupon’s getting into the point-of-sale game with a tablet-based system to rival Square. They’re calling it Gnome, and they want to trademark the name — which doesn’t sit well with the GNOME project.

Grab a dictionary (or hit up Google), and it’s easy enough to see why Groupon feels like Gnome is a good name for their point-of-sale terminal. In the fantasy world, gnomes sometimes look after epic underground piles of treasure. It’s also used as a label for experts in banking monetary matters (“the gnomes of Zurich”).

Still, for Groupon to ignore the 17-year history of the GNOME project and the highly popular desktop environment it produces is a slap in the face for supporters of free and open source software. They’re also ignoring the fact that the project already has a trademark on GNOME, and have had it for the past eight years.

And there’s still one more thing they’re ignoring: this blog post on their very own website. It’s titled “Sharing is Caring,” and it’s all about how much Groupon loves open source and how important and amazing the people who contribute to open source software are. In their defense, that post was published a whole month ago, so it’s possible that they just forgot about how much they cared about the open source movement over the past four weeks.

GNOME supporters are not at all pleased by Groupon’s move. ” We are outraged that Groupon would attempt to insinuate that its proprietary software and products have anything to do with the GNOME community,” said Andrew Lee of Private Internet Access.

Groupon has countered with a new blog post. In it, they claim that they’ve been communicating with the GNOME for months to find a “mutually satisfactory resolution,” adding that they’ll gladly look for another name if they can’t work things out because, well, they love open source.

Now, if that’s actually true, you wouldn’t think that GNOME would need to go out looking for donations for a legal defense fund. No, the fact that they’re doing just that makes it seem as though “mutually satisfactory” really means Groupon will take the Gnome trademark and GNOME can slink off into a corner and figure out another way to brand their 17-year free software legacy.

GNOME figures they’ll need around $80,000 to formally oppose Groupon’s first set of ten trademark applications. The good news is that if their legal team doesn’t need all the money it’ll go toward furthering the GNOME project. Head on over and kick in a few bucks if you can.

Update: That was over in a hurry. After lengthy discussions with the open source community today (which no doubt involved a lot of shouting and fist shaking), Groupon decided to back down. They’re officially looking for a new name — and no, it’s not going to be ‘Electronic Monetary And Coupon System’ or something like that.